Let Food Safety, Storage, Handling Be Restaurant Inspectors' Priority

September 4, 1995

Florida restaurant inspectors are shifting their emphasis to serious problems that could create food-borne illness, which always should have been the top priority. The recent salmonella outbreak traced to a West Palm Beach restaurant jarred the state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation into re-examining how inspectors examine each of Florida's 35,104 restaurants.

Their belated conclusion makes obvious sense: Inspectors should focus on practices that directly affect food served to customers. Do employees wash their hands at proper intervals? Is food stored and cooked at safe temperatures? Is chicken prepared in separate areas from vegetables?.

From now on, less attention will be paid to such non-threatening violations as missing lightbulbs or a tile that has fallen off the wall. Inspectors still will have to evaluate each restaurant in 57 categories, as their jobs require, but the emphasis now is where it should be, protecting customers from possible illness.

In a sense, the salmonella outbreak may have served a useful purpose, something of a wake-up call for restaurant operators and inspectors alike. After eating at Margarita y Amigas restaurant in August, 175 patrons tested positive for salmonella, and as many as 2,100 may have become ill. The restaurant closed on Aug. 9 and reopened nine days later after correcting food-handling violations.

This unfortunate episode galvanized state health officials to look again at their procedures and priorities, with encouraging results so far. It's a grueling job for hard-pressed inspectors, who examine about eight food-service businesses every day and return for follow-ups if serious violations are found.

The state will get tougher with restaurant operators guilty of serious violations. A policy of forgive-and-forget, if the violations are corrected, will be replaced with fines in some cases.

Restaurant operators, too, have had to rethink their policies of training and retraining employees. Turnover among employees should mean almost constant training in sanitary practices of handling and preparing food.

All of this will tend toward better protection of customers' health. That is, unless everybody slacks off again after a few weeks. It's relatively easy to heighten consciousness, and act firmly, after a highly publicized incident of illness from restaurant food.

It will be much harder for inspectors and restaurant operators to keep going, day after day, at a high and sustained level of carefulness. That, however, is their unmistakable responsibility.